It was a good day…

It’s amazing how much your outlook changes just by starting fresh. Granted, starting a new job today, I didn’t have a whole lot to do. Though, I must say with everything going on recently, it was nice to have a non-stressful day. Just some highlights of the recent month (in list form for all you list-lovers, though I realize last month’s BloPoMo was lists):

• Having a coworker leave somewhat suddenly and not be able to replace him.
• Having another coworker out for a good portion of a week for a family emergency and then out the next week for a scheduled vacation
• New puppies and all the training, housework, cleanup, etc that comes along with it (along with multiple vet visits, repeated vomiting of medicines prompting re-dosing and medicine changes, etc)
• A couple quick trips on weekends to visit my grandmother, who’s declining a little quicker than expected
• An unusually long Saturday workday
• Trying to finish up all the last little tasks before leaving my current job for another position in the company
• Water coming out the overflow of the water heater several days in a row causing a bit of a mess in the basement and flushing the tank to help prevent lime buildup
• The bathroom tub clogging (yet, again – I really am on a first-name basis with my plumber…he remembers me and especially the house) and them having to replace a section of pipe to get out the clog that was building for several years from the sounds of it.

This month has started a bit better, and I hope it stays that way.

*yawn* Happy New Year!

You’d think after 11 days off work, I wouldn’t be so tired. But I really didn’t relax much over vacation. Between everything I related last time, then getting the kitchen cleaned up and all the Christmas decorations taken down inside the house, that filled up the rest of the weekend. Sunday afternoon and Monday was spent running some errands in preparation for a New Year’s Eve Party we were attending.

It was a good party. Little difficult getting there in the snow since the party was a bit in the middle of nowhere, but we made it fine. Pretty low key party, but still fun. Basically played a little Rock Band, some drinking games and hung out, talking. I enjoyed Rock Band, but I’m not much for singing, and I enjoy the guitar more than the drums, so I’m fine with sticking with Guitar Hero. Mr. B actually plays the drums and has been in a band, but he didn’t do so well with the Rock Band drum set and didn’t want to play too much for fear that he’d mess up the way he’s used to playing for real. So we’ll be sticking with Guitar Hero. Getting home was a little fun. With the wind, there were some places that were a complete whiteout.

Anyway, I stayed up way too late on New Year’s Eve and didn’t sleep much, so I was wiped out on Tues. We had planned on going to Dave’s Open House and figured we’d go early given the weather. Well, after getting home and getting some lunch we were a bit behind. Not to mention I almost didn’t make it because we just bought a pizza stone and it started smoking when it was first warming up (which it says is normal), and when I was trying to put the pizza in on it, the smoke really hurt my eyes. Between that and being tired, my eyes were burning. After a shower, they were feeling a bit better. We got on the road and finally made it out to Dave’s close to 5, maybe. We had planned on getting there closer to 3 or 4. We had a good time and were there until about 8:30, and the trip home was quite a bit longer than it should have been given it was still slow-going.

I got absolutely nothing accomplished the rest of the week except going to work. And even there it was a struggle to get things done cause I was really not wanting to be there. I’m not sure anyone was. I pretty much spent this whole weekend just vegging out and relaxing. However, yesterday in the nice weather, we did get the outside Christmas decorations taken down. And a few days before Christmas we did find a very large inflatable arch on a good sale price, so we finally got that set up to make sure it worked correctly. We’ll be putting that up next year. One more step in Mr. B’s quest for the Griswold house. As we finished up and came back inside, Mr. B lamented “And…Christmas is over”. When I reminded him the undecorated tree was still up awaiting his help in disassembling and storing it, he added, “Woohoo! And Christmas lives on.”

And in all that, I’ve been meaning to blog, but hadn’t quite gotten there. Had plenty to talk about, but no real energy to do so. And I know Josh has been saying lately how easy it is to blog at least a little bit each day, but that doesn’t really take into account how long-winded detail-oriented I am when it comes to blogging. And I’m sure there’s still more for me to blog about, but I’m all blogged out for the night, so I guess it’ll wait til later. I just can’t make any promises about when that later will be. I’ve really fallen off since NaBloPoMo.

Where did December go?

This month has flown by, and there’s not that much left and plenty to still do. The first weekend of December, we went to the Festival of Lights in East Peoria with my parents. Started with the drive through section and then we went to the section inside the Festival of Lights building. They had a lot of different decorate trees that were cute, but otherwise not much in there. Outside they were doing hot air balloon rides. It was tethered at 90 feet, but was still pretty cool. Not sure I’d want to go any higher. The rest of the weekend was spent doing decorations.

The second weekend of December was a trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota for Mr. B’s car club Christmas party. We went up a little early to go to Mall of America and got about half our Christmas shopping done. Mr. B also bought a bunch more work clothes on sale. We stopped at a few specialty stores and an outlet mall to get a bit more shopping done on our way home. The third weekend, we went to Madison, Wisconsin for a family Christmas party and to visit with the rest of the family.

The fourth weekend really started the Christmas frenzy. I finished with work for the year on Friday afternoon. Friday night we went out to get some of the last minute little gifts and gift certificates we hadn’t managed to get yet and bought some more Christmas decorations on sale. Saturday was spent wrapping presents, running out to get some stocking stuffers for Mr. B, getting all the various cards, and then we took a break to go see the new National Treasure movie. Pretty good movie. Definitely worth seeing.

On Sunday, we celebrated Christmas with Mr. B’s family. On Monday, Christmas Eve, Mr. B and I celebrated our Christmas during the day then celebrated with my family that evening. On Tuesday, Christmas Day, we went back to spend some time with Mr. B’s family and then had dinner with my family. On Wednesday, Mr. B went back to work and I started cleaning up around the house by doing a boat load of laundry and dishes. We then ran out to do some exchanges and also to buy a much needed DVD rack. Mr. B put that together last night and I got all the DVDs on it.

Today I rearranged the DVDs slightly to try and make the stand a bit more stable (more bottom-heavy than top-heavy). I also cleaned up and organized the four piles of magazines in the rack under the TV. I got them all divided and ordered and into 10 magazine files that we bought at IKEA while in Minnesota. I then had to rearrange a couple bookshelves in order to fit all the magazines, but also managed to pitch a bunch of stuff that will go out with the garbage tomorrow. In between all that, I managed to get more laundry done. Tonight we ran out to do a few more exchanges, but ran out of time before we got all our shopping done.

The last item is an attempted fix for our remote. The infrared LEDs are apparently shot in the remote and it’s no longer in warranty, so Mr. B is going to try to solder a few new LEDs in place to fix it. We’ve heard the necessary supplies are at Radio Shack, but we didn’t make it there before they closed, so that will probably need to wait for another night. *sigh*

So there’s been a lot going on, and a lot accomplished, but it still feels like I haven’t really even made a dent yet. How sad is that? And unfortunately, work is coming back around oh so quickly. Why do vacations always seem so short? I need more time I tell you.

I overdid it

I was actually too productive today (well yesterday, but I haven’t slept yet, so it’s still today), and I’m paying for it now. My back is aching, and depending upon how I shift my weight, I get shooting pains up my leg, butt, and lower back. I probably could have handled the raking and picking up hedge trimmings, or the sweeping and picking up leaves on the patio, or the digging out decorations and bending and stretching to put them on the tree (yes, we had to decorate the tree tonight). Unfortunately, my body was not able to handle all three in a single day. And tomorrow I get to help put all the outside lights up.

I’m pretty sure I need more vacation to recover from this one. I’m not really looking forward to going back to work on Monday.

Got a big week ahead of me…

Vacation is going to be busy with work. Just with work around the house instead of work at work. I hope I can get to even a marginal amount of the tasks I’m trying to get accomplished. The main issue with the house is I don’t get around to cleaning, and I’ve finally decided to just give that up as a lost cause. It’s just not gonna happen. Before I can get everything cleaned, some of the first ones badly need cleaned again, and since they’re the most inconvenient ones, they’re the only ones I get to. I just can’t seem to get caught up with all the other stuff going on around the house. And it’s not helping that work is wearing me out so I don’t have any energy left to mess with cleaning.

So my plan for next week is to de-clutter the house. I need to get all the crap cleaned up and out of the way so I can bring in a housekeeper to make sure the house gets cleaned and stays cleaned. My mom even mentioned that she’d hire someone to come in and do a full house clean for my Christmas present. Let me tell you, that’s a terribly attractive offer. Especially cause Dave could possibly put me in touch with a housekeeper (and yes, Dave, I’ll probably be asking again soon), but right now I’m a little nervous about having that person, if she’s available, come give me an estimate of how much it’ll cost and how often she should come to clean when this house is way dirtier than it would ever get should it actually receive regular cleaning.

So, next week is going to be quite busy with going through each room, finding a home for all the junk or just getting rid of it. When Mr. B isn’t working and can help, we also need to get the yard cleaned up. This involves getting all the leaves picked up, trimming back the hedges, trying to rescue the backyard flowerbed from the neighbor’s overgrowth, etc.

I just hope I don’t work myself into immobility since I’m not used to that much physical activity.

One of those mornings…

Mr. B’s alarm clock went off around 6:50 this morning cause he was getting up early to go to a car show.  For whatever reason, my mind forgot that it was Sunday, so when I heard the alarm and looked over, I thought we had both overslept.  See, he normally gets up at 4:30ish, and my alarm usually goes off about 6:40.  A much worse situation for him than for me since he’d have already been quite late for work.  He stopped the alarm, looked at the clock, and I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t freaking out as well.  That’s when it hit that it was actually Sunday, and I was very glad to go back to sleep.  Just wish it had been Saturday still.

Be vewy, vewy qwiet. I’m hunting wabbits.

OK, so I’m not hunting rabbits, but I’ve been very quiet lately. There are multiple reasons for this, but since there are people out there that I know love lists so well, I figure I might as well put this in list form.

• I’ve been trying to spend more time getting the house cleaned up and less time procrastinating by doing things like blogging, not that that’s necessarily working.
• I’ve been spending more time reading books (if you couldn’t tell from the “On the Bookshelf” posts continuing even while I’ve been quiet otherwise) instead of being online.
• The things I want to say aren’t really appropriate to be posted in public, and I don’t really feel the need to write a blog post that can’t be seen. Even if I did, you’d still think I was being quiet.
• I haven’t kept up on the “I Want…Friday” posts because they started seeming a bit repetitive. There’s only so many posts related to wanting a new job, being worn out from my job, etc. that I can post. So, I was going with my second choice, but the job-related ones were so pressing, it was hard to come up with something else. And that also somewhat defeated the purpose of them.
• Lately, I’ve been really busy, stressed out, and extremely frustrated at work. That’s made me really tired and extremely unmotivated, so I haven’t even felt like blogging. Then again, this falls back into the not appropriate to be posted in public and repetitive, and so on…Well, you get the idea.
• There hasn’t really been anything else on my mind, so I’ve struggled with finding anything else to say…

Now, does this mean I’ll be blogging again? Not sure. I don’t think this really means anything except I felt the need to explain my absence. But, I’m hoping to come out of this funk. Debra has been a great help in getting my workload under control. And I had a pretty good and long talk with my supervisor yesterday, so maybe some things will start changing. One can hope…

I was mentioning to Josh the other day that I need to take a sabbatical. I am in desperate need of a vacation. Though sometimes vacations make things worse. Things got all messed up when Josh wasn’t around for Thurs. and Fri. last week. And when I took Mon. off, a different set of things went out of control. It’s almost sometimes worse to go on vacation cause of what you get to come back to. But it’s not bad enough to give up vacation. There was an e-mail going around that they’re offering unpaid leaves of 1-2 weeks if someone wants to. I can’t tell you how tempting that is. But it’s dependent upon supervisor discretion and work load, and considering I was just drafted into a pretty involved project, I don’t think I’d be able to do it. But it’s nice to dream…

You Know You Need a Vacation When…

The Office Etiquette tip at the bottom of a weekly headlines e-mail sends you into a mental tirade.